First came the obvious—the one and only task Theo couldn't complete while burying himself in the underground.
And so, he started by cutting down just enough trees to satisfy the requirements for the one building he judged paramount for his plans—the constructor's office.
'It's a good thing it takes more stone than wood,' Theo thought as he felled one tree after the other, intentionally cutting them down in the survival fashion, only to then gradually turn their trunks into blocky resources by switching over the manner in which he portioned them off.
'But still… It's all but a question of how long it's going to take to have it built.'
For but a moment, his eyes moved over to the timer that relentlessly continued to tick away.
[19:28:33]
Now that Theo was in a proper hurry, his tree-cutting speed… grew to nearly a stall when it came to the number of trees he cleared out, all for the sake of getting more planks out of each tree he harvested.
And by the time the timer struck eighteen hours until the invasion, Theo finally reached the quota he set for himself, only to stash his axe without even a moment of hesitation, switching over to his mining pick while already moving to the shaft he unearthed previously.
"Now, for the iron and the nails…"
Dropping down all the way to his mining base, Theo quickly used up a petty amount of stone to set up a wall-sized section for simple furnaces before filling them all with a stack of wood each and then using whatever sparse amount of ore he managed to gather while mining stone.
'At the very least, I should be able to figure out the recipe with those fifty ores I've got from my passive,' he thought, only to set up a fresh, short algorithm for himself before closing his eyes and breathing out, falling right into the embrace of his zoned-in state of mind.
Snap.
Theo came back to his senses after what felt like but a second… if a second could ever make his muscles go from well-rested to properly warmed up and in the perfect state to keep going.
His tunnel also grew by quite a lot, reaching all the way to the one goal Theo failed to accomplish in his previous mining run—the ore vein.
"So that's it…" Theo muttered, sparing but a single moment to rest his hand down on the stone of a slightly different color that proved to be unsurprisingly harder for him to mine.
"As much as I would love to just mine it all away, though, I really don't want to risk exhausting it all in the moment of need…" Theo sighed away before shaking his head and picking up the slack as he started to mine not the ore itself but all the stone around it.
A process that soon turned out to be quite herculean, with the ore patch following the rules of the voxel-based games he knew rather than the blocky one, reaching far and deep throughout the stone in an extremely irregular manner.
"This is making it hard to mine around it," Theo spoke out in frustration as he had to change the direction of his mining yet again in order not to hit the iron vein directly. "But at this point… I guess there's really no point worrying about exhausting it. Rather than that… just how the heck is this vein supposed to be within the area of my mansion?!"
Shaking his head with exasperation, Theo raised his pick and struck it down against the reddish stone, only for the notification that appeared to be slightly different than what he was already used to.
[Mining: 24%]
[Mining: 48%]
[Mining: 72%]
[Mining: 98%]
[Mining: Completed]
Since this wasn't the stone he was mining, his stone-related perk didn't apply, forcing him to mine through the whole hundred percent of the block's endurance. And as if to spite him in the face, the system decided that he lacked a whole one percent of damage to mine out a single block with four strikes, forcing him to execute a total of five moves per block!
"At the very least, I shouldn't need all that much ore for now…" Theo muttered, gritting his teeth at the inconvenience as he mined away.
Mining the ore was supposed to be a joyous task, one that would allow Theo to move up the progress chain and enter a whole new age. Not only would it allow him to finally craft all the new tools he would need but also start investing in the new buildings or the new recipes he formerly couldn't really afford…
Right now, however, all that mattered was to get the constructor's office going.
And by the time he managed to fill a whole four slots of his inventory with nothing but the reddish iron ore, all the excitement Theo could feel about getting his hands on copious amounts of iron had long since vanished, expelled by all the sweat Theo lost over the task of mining it out.
'How's the…'
Before he could even finish the single thought, Theo turned his eyes towards the ticking clock to his potential doom.
[17:39:41]
"Not bad," he whispered, only to turn around on his heel and then rush the same way he came, sparing no effort as he ran through the narrow corridor he mined out before.
Thanks to his earlier foresight, by the time he returned to his mining base, all the ore he previously put into the furnaces had long since turned into ingots.
Heck, it happened so long ago, the furnaces had already turned perfectly cold, matching the chilly temperature of the underground.
"Now…" Theo muttered as he quickly gathered all fifty-four pieces of iron ingots from the furnaces before splitting all the four stacks of ore he brought up and then slotting it all into each of the furnaces he prepared. "How the heck do I make the iron nails?"
The tools could wait. Sure, they would make mining not only easier but, even more importantly, faster, but…
But right now, Theo didn't have the luxury of wasting even a second of potential boosts for the future. Not when a single iron ingot could potentially make the difference between him getting enough nails and falling short.
In the end, however, even after spending a whopping five minutes looking through the potential recipes or trying to arrange the iron ingots in his crafting window in every possible way, combination, or form… the recipe for the iron nails remained as elusive as before.
"That means I have no other choice but to get back up to the surface… as if!"
Rather than wasting all the time it would take for him to climb up, Theo whipped out just a few pieces of wood before turning them into planks and then crafting a fresh crafting bench he then wasted no time planting smack-dab in the middle of his underground base.
"Now, don't you dare disappoint me…" he muttered… only to then breathe one hell of a solid sigh of relief.
'It's there!'
Not only was the recipe for the nails pretty much in his face the moment he opened the crafting window enhanced by the crafting station, as if the system noticed his desperation and decided to lend him a bit of a hand, the recipe itself… was insanely generous!
'A hundred nails for just a single ingot?!' For a second, Theo felt like crying. 'If not for how I still need a hundred of those ingots for that damned office, I would quite likely cry out for real,' he thought, as he slapped ten ingots into his system and attempted to pull the nails out…
Only to realize that, just like the tier 2 buildings, the materials above the extremely basic level also came with crafting time.
Still, with this part of the process done, Theo turned his attention back to the furnaces before gathering all of the ingots that his wall of encased flames managed to smelt through… only to then clench his hands as he bit down on his bottom lip.
"You really want me to just stand around while doing nothing, don't you?" he muttered silently, feeling a surging rise of hostility towards his system when he fell short on pretty much as many ingots as it would take his furnaces to smelt in the same time he needed to finish crafting up the nails.
Having no other choice… Theo still refused to just sit down and do nothing, opting to use the ten minutes of idle wait on the one productive activity he could think of—mining for even more stone.
'While I don't have any active defenses, those warding towers…' Theo gritted his teeth as the pick in his hands continued to grow heavier and heavier with every hurried swing he made with it. 'If they really can weaken the attacking enemies, then I need to get as many of those as I can!' he thought, powering through the exhaustion of his rush.
Before he could mine any substantial amount of stone, however, both the smelting and the crafting of the nails finally came to an end, allowing Theo to finally make the first of the few steps he outlined in the mental plan he drafted for defending his belongings.
"I wish to build the constructor's office!" he screamed out into the darkness of his underground base. A darkness that then slightly lit up when a strand of light emerged from his chest, only for the resources in his inventory to start to vanish, stolen away by the construction process.
A process that came with yet another timer.
Thankfully, a timer that was within what Theo could still allow.
[1:00:00]
[59:59]
[59:58]
[59:57]
'An hour, huh?' the young man thought, only to fall down on his ass and take a long breath to replenish the scarce oxygen in his lungs.
'With four hours' building time on the warding towers and ten hours necessary for the stone wall, I should be in the clear, especially with how those are supposed to decrease once the office is completed,' Theo thought, allowing himself just a few moments of rest.
A rest that came at the cost of the precious seconds ticking away from the red numbers on the invasion clock.
"Now, to the next step," Theo muttered to himself as he raised his eyes up to the dirt-based roof of his underground base.
Then, he sighed away.
"Trenches. I need a lot of trenches. And then, just for good measure, bunkers."
Theo's plan was simple, warranted by how he lacked the time to come up with anything complicated.
He was going to dig individual trenches between the stone-wall-to-be and the wooden palisade before turning each of them into simple stone bunkers and then connecting them all into a network of underground tunnels.
But while those bunkers would offer him nothing but some degree of protection, he still had to find a way to attack those that dared to invade his lands!
And for precisely that reason, Theo dared not to give himself more than just a single moment of rest.
For right now, he only knew of one way to ensure he would get his hands on the one weapon—simple, yet effective and deadly enough—that would also work well with the idea of those bunkers.
A weapon that was cheap on its own but required him to satisfy the steep material costs of the specialized industry that right now would sap away pretty much all of his wood, most of his stone, and quite a lot more iron and nails than what he could afford at the moment.
"I'm not going to let anyone take this place away from me," Theo muttered with a grim look on his face as he pushed his body back up, his hands tightly gripping the handle of his pick.
"And for that, I need three things," he commented out loud as he breathed a heavy sigh and snatched ten more ingots that his furnaces managed to smelt through as he rested.
"Iron tools to get all the resources in time, enough iron to get the specialized industry…"
Theo took in a breath as the fires of determination reignited in his eyes.
"And then enough crossbows and bolts to make anyone stepping into my lands regret they didn't turn away instead!"